Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill

  For former Chilean political prisoner and torture victim Tito Tricot, the use of Chileans and other soldiers from countries with atrocious human rights records by the United States is “nothing new.” But, he says, “There is something deeply perverse about the privatization of the Iraq War and the utilization of mercenaries. This externalization of services or outsourcing attempts to lower costs—‘Third World’ mercenaries are paid less than their counterparts from the developed world—and maximize benefits, i.e.: ‘Let others fight the war for the Americans.’ In either case, the Iraqi people do not matter at all. It is precisely this dehumanization of the ‘enemy’ that makes it easier for the private companies and the U.S. government to recruit mercenaries. It is exactly the same strategy used by the Chilean military to train members of the secret police and make it easy to annihilate opponents of the dictatorship. In other words, Chilean mercenaries in Iraq is business as usual.”80

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “THE WHORES OF WAR”

  WHILE BLACKWATER plotted out its expansion in the aftermath of the Fallujah ambush and internationalized its force in Iraq, the families of the four men killed there on March 31, 2004, looked for answers. They wanted to know how their loved ones ended up in the middle of the volatile city that morning, not to mention in SUVs, short-staffed and underarmed. All of the families considered themselves patriotic Americans, military families—Special Forces people. For the Zovko family, life since Fallujah had become consumed with a quest to understand their son’s life and death. Danica Zovko, Jerry’s mother, spent months piecing together details and memories. 1 She recalled a week back in the summer of 2003, when Jerry was visiting her before heading off to Iraq. The national power crisis had left her family without electricity in their Cleveland, Ohio, home. “We had a lot of time to just spend at home—no TV, no radio, no nothing—just sitting outside and talking.” She remembered conversing with her son about his work and travels. “While we sat there, my Jerry told me, ‘The best thing that one can do in life is to sort of plant seeds and see what’s going on so that no matter where you go, you never close the doors behind you—that you always have someone to be there that you can count on.’ When I think about that now, all that talking and everything we did, that’s what that comes out to.”

  At first, it didn’t seem to Danica Zovko that anyone other than the insurgents in Fallujah were to blame for her son’s gruesome death. In the immediate aftermath, she could not bring herself to read any news stories or look at the graphic images, but there was little doubt in her mind who bore the responsibility. From the start, Blackwater seemed on top of the situation. At 8 p.m. on March 31, 2004, Erik Prince showed up in person at the family home in Cleveland, accompanied by a state trooper, Danica recalled. “[Prince] told us that Jerry was one of the men killed that day,” she said. “We were numb. Just numb. He also told me that as far as he was concerned, if anyone was going to survive the war in Iraq, he thought it was going to be my Jerry. He said he saw Jerry, he met with Jerry, he was in Baghdad with Jerry, that Jerry was—you would think he really, really liked Jerry.” Danica Zovko said Prince handed them a form to fill out for $3,000 for funeral expenses, promised that Jerry’s body would be coming home soon and that Prince would attend the funeral in person.

  On April 6, Paul Bremer wrote the Zovkos a letter: “I would like to personally assure you that Jerry was serving an honorable cause. The Iraqi people will be successful in their long journey towards a democratic and free society,” Bremer wrote. “Jerry was a dedicated individual and will remain an inspiration to all of us in Iraq whether civilian or military. In the line of duty, he gave his all. Rest assured that our authorities are actively investigating Jerry’s murder and that we will not rest until those responsible are punished for this despicable crime. You[r] family will remain in our thoughts and prayers as you confront this terrible tragedy in the difficult days ahead. I will do my part to ensure Jerry’s contribution to this country will be forever remembered by the Iraq people [sic].”2 Three days later, Jerry Zovko’s remains returned to the United States in an aluminum box at Dover Air Force base in Delaware.3 True to his word, Danica Zovko said, Erik Prince came to the wake and funeral.

  In Tampa, Florida, meanwhile, Scott Helvenston’s family held a funeral at Florida National Cemetery. His godfather, Circuit Judge William Levens, eulogized Scott as “a warrior who wanted peace—peace in his heart, peace in the world.”4 In the obituary in the paper, Helvenston’s family wrote, “Scott lost his life heroically serving his country.”5 A few weeks later, Scott Helvenston’s high school buddies heard about an event in his hometown of Winter Haven, Florida, organized by Republican State Representative Baxter Troutman. The “Operation Troop Salute” event was to honor servicemen and -women deployed in the war zone and would be attended by eight thousand people, among them First Lady Laura Bush and the president’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush.6 Helvenston’s buddies hoped that their fallen friend, the ex-SEAL, could be mentioned from the podium in honor of his service in Iraq. But Troutman, the organizer, said no—because Scott was a private contractor, not an active-duty soldier. “This was for the servicemen and -women who are not there by choice; to me, that makes a difference,” Troutman said. “If I am an employee of a company and don’t like what I am being subjected to, then I can come back home.”7 To Scott’s friends, it was devastating. “They’d be naming streets after him if he was still enlisted,” said high school pal Ed Twyford.8

  Katy Helvenston-Wettengel was finding that there were almost no resources available to families of private contractors killed in the war and decided to reach out to one of the few people she could think of who would understand what she was going through. She looked up Danica Zovko and called her. The two developed a friendship and mutual quest for the truth of what had happened to their sons. “For the first couple of months, we flew back and forth, like, every other week, and we were there holding each other up. When one was struggling, the other would pick us up and vice versa,” recalled Helvenston-Wettengel. “Those first few months after, I didn’t quit crying—for almost a year. I cried every day. I just missed him so much and he’s my baby. I know he’s a big macho man, but he’s my baby.”9

  As more details on the ambush emerged in the media, the families moved from grieving to questioning how it all happened. “Why weren’t they escorted?” wondered Tom Zovko, Jerry’s brother. “I don’t believe my brother would have done that. He was definitely not careless.”10 When Danica Zovko learned details of the mission the men had been on in Fallujah, she said, “I couldn’t believe it. I could not believe my son would be escorting trucks and protecting trucks. That was not my son. That made me believe that no, that’s not my Jerry, it must be someone else. I just couldn’t see him doing that, I just couldn’t. Even we buried his casket and I didn’t see the body and I’m going on the words of people—politicians and money-hungry people—that that’s him in there. I still sometimes dream that my Jerry is somewhere and just can’t call or doesn’t have a computer. But you know, I know it isn’t that. But you can’t help but hope.” Danica Zovko said that things started to feel strange when Blackwater returned Jerry’s belongings and some of his things were missing. She said her efforts to get these items—or information about them—were curiously stymied by the company. She started reading some articles about the incident and about her son’s mysterious employer, Blackwater. “When you want to find out things, when you start questioning yourself, when you are not content with saying, ‘It’s in God’s hands,’ when you think, well let me find out, your eyes open,” she said. “I found out there were no rules and no laws that govern what my son was doing, that it was an open place, you know. He was working for a company that could do whatever they wanted to do and however they wanted to do it.” She started thinking more about the ambush: What were they even doing in Fallujah?

  But it wasn’t just the families who sensed something was off. In fact, the very day of the ambush, questions arose abou
t “who is driving around in unprotected SUVs” in Iraq.11 On Fox News, retired Col. Ralph Peters said, “I have to give you a painful answer on this. Either the most foolish contractors in the history of mankind or frankly it may have been intelligence people doing intelligence work. I don’t know. I was talking to a colonel friend of mine who is over in the Gulf right now, today, about this. And he said, ‘If they’re contractors, this is Darwinian selection at work.’”12 Meanwhile, on NPR the next day, New York Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman came out of Fallujah asking the same questions. “What’s really mysterious, though, is why two unescorted, unarmored cars would be driving through the downtown of one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq without any serious protection,” Gettleman said. “If this could happen to these guys, who are, you know, well trained and had a lot of experience in dealing with things like this, you know, what does it mean for others like myself who walk into situations in places like Fallujah and don’t have the military background?”13 Other mercenary firms weighed in as well. “We have a policy with our international security division that requires that they use armored vehicles at all times,” said Frank Holder of Kroll on Fox News. “We won’t take an assignment unless there are armored vehicles.”14

  A few days later, London’s Observer newspaper ran a story referencing the Fallujah ambush, headlined “Veiled Threat: Why an SUV Is Now the Most Dangerous Vehicle in Iraq.”15 The article labeled SUVs “the occupation car of choice.” The Observer’s correspondent noted, “Falluja is a centre of the anti-American resistance, where even the police don’t support the Americans. US soldiers don’t drive through Falluja much. When they do, they have helicopter back-up and heavy armour. ‘Almost every foreigner who has been killed here is an idiot,’ said one ex-Navy SEAL. Soldiers often show little sympathy for those who fail to follow the right procedure.”16 In a reaction piece written from Amman and Baghdad, Professor Mark LeVine wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, “[M]any here see last week’s carnage of Americans in Fallujah as suspicious. To send foreign contractors into Fallujah in late-model SUVs with armed escorts—down a traffic-clogged street on which they’d be literal sitting ducks—can be interpreted as a deliberate US instigation of violence to be used as a pretext for ‘punishment’ by the US military.”17 Amid the graphic scenes of mutilation and the dominant rhetoric of revenge emanating from the Pentagon and White House, the obvious questions about the Blackwater mission that day were overshadowed, but they certainly did not disappear. The company clearly knew it would have to offer some sort of an explanation.

  A week after the ambush, Blackwater put forward a narrative that the New York Times said “could deflect blame for the incident from Blackwater.”18 “The truth is, we got led into this ambush,” Blackwater vice president Patrick Toohey, a decorated career military officer, told the Times. “We were set up.”19 According to Blackwater’s version of events, as reported by the Times, the four men killed in Fallujah “were in fact lured into a carefully planned ambush by men they believed to be friendly members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps . . . [who] promised the Blackwater-led convoy safe and swift passage through the dangerous city, but instead, a few kilometers later, they suddenly blocked off the road, preventing any escape from waiting gunmen.”20 According to the subsequent Congressional investigation, the CPA report on the ambush disputed this account, finding that “the evidence does not support the claim that the ICDC participated in the ambush, either by escorting the convoy into Fallujah or by using its own vehicle to block the convoy from escaping the ambush.”21 Despite the increasing hostilities in Fallujah at the time, the Times went along with the company’s line, reporting that the Blackwater convoy “had little cause for suspicion.” In the Times story, no questions were raised about the lack of armored vehicles or the fact that there were only four men on the mission instead of six. Lending credence to Blackwater’s story, the Times declared that “the company’s initial findings are in line with recent complaints from senior American officials about Iraqi forces”:

  In testimony last month to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East, spoke openly of his worries about the Iraqi security and police forces, now numbering more than 200,000. “There’s no doubt that terrorists and insurgents will attempt to infiltrate the security forces,” he said. “We know it’s happening, and we know it has happened. We attempt to do our best with regard to vetting people.” Also, the Pentagon has received new intelligence reports warning that Sunni and Shiite militia groups have been ransacking Iraqi police stations in some cities, and then handing out both weapons and police uniforms to angry mobs, government officials said.22

  But this story was soon directly contradicted by one of the most senior U.S. officials in Iraq at the time—Bremer’s deputy, Jim Steele, who had been sent covertly into Fallujah to recover the bodies and investigate.23 After Steele met with Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker magazine in Baghdad, Anderson reported that Steele had “concluded that there was no evidence that the Iraqi police had betrayed the contractors.”24 This was backed up by Malcolm Nance, a former naval intelligence officer and FBI terrorism adviser who headed a private security firm in Iraq at the time. “In Fallujah especially, an [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps] guarantee is of zero value,” Nance said. “You would never trust the word of local forces in a place like that—especially if you were driving a high-profile convoy, as these people were.”25 Richard Perry, another former naval intelligence officer, who worked with Scott Helvenston when he was still in the service, said, “[E]verything that happened in Fallujah that day was a serious mistake. I simply cannot understand why the hell they were driving through the most dangerous part of Iraq in just two vehicles without a proper military escort. . . . They were lightly armed, and yet they would be up against people who regularly take on the U.S. Army.”26 Time magazine reported that “A former private military operator with knowledge of Blackwater’s operational tactics says the firm did not give all its contract warriors in Afghanistan proper training in offensive-driving tactics, although missions were to include vehicular and dignitary-escort duty. ‘Evasive driving and ambush tactics were not—repeat, were not—covered in training,’ this source said.”27

  Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle reported from Baghdad that Control Risks Group, the firm Blackwater had taken over the ESS contract from, had warned Blackwater at the time that Fallujah was not safe to travel through: “According to senior executives working with other Baghdad security companies, Blackwater’s decision to press ahead anyway stemmed from a desire to impress its new clients. ‘There has been a big row about this,’ said one executive, who asked not to be named. ‘Not long before the convoy left, Control Risks said, “Don’t go through Fallujah, it’s not safe.” But Blackwater wanted to show . . . that nowhere was too dangerous for them.’”28 In response, Blackwater spokesman Bertelli said, “It is certainly not out of the question that some of Blackwater’s competitors would use this tragic occurrence as an opportunity to try and damage Blackwater’s reputation and secure contracts for themselves.”29

  In what would turn out to be the most comprehensive statement Blackwater would provide at the time on the incident, Bertelli told the Chronicle:

  While our internal investigation continues, we are not aware of any specific warnings by anyone, including other private security contractors, that the route being traveled the day of March 31 was not the safest route to the convoy’s destination. The two men leading the convoy had extensive experience in Iraq prior to the trip that resulted in the ambush and were well aware of the areas that are considered to be highly dangerous. They were all highly trained former U.S. Navy SEAL and Special Forces troops. The ambush took place in such a way that it would not have made a difference if there had been additional personnel protecting the convoy.30

  In the meantime, local reporters in North Carolina started digging for answers in Blackwater’s backyard. A few months after Blackwater’s ali
bi was published in the New York Times, Joseph Neff and Jay Price of the Raleigh News and Observer cast further doubt on Blackwater’s narrative. “[C]ontractors who have worked with Blackwater in Iraq were skeptical that the team had arranged for an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps escort,” the paper reported on August 1, 2004. “The Iraqi security force simply wasn’t trusted, said the contractors, who asked not to be named to protect their jobs.”31 More important, the News and Observer had sources inside the company who were raising serious questions about the conditions under which the four men were sent into Fallujah:

  The contractors also said security teams on the ESS contract had insufficient firepower. And the team ambushed in Fallujah should have been the standard Blackwater team of three men in each car, not two, the contractors said. Days after the ambush, Helvenston’s family got a copy of an April 13 [2004] e-mail message by someone who identified herself as Kathy Potter, an Alaska woman who had helped run Blackwater’s Kuwait City office while Helvenston was there. Most of the lengthy message consisted of condolences. Potter, however, also said Helvenston’s normal team, operating in relatively safe southern Iraq, had six members—not four like the group that entered Fallujah. Potter also wrote that Helvenston helped acquire “the backup vehicles and critical supplies for these vehicles . . . when the original plan for armored vehicles fell through.” Company officials declined to say why there were no armored vehicles for the ESS contract.32